In 1998, when most of my friends were still using paper and envelope to send their mails, I made my first Hotmail email address. For more than 4 months, there are no emails other than junk mails there. Oh yes, plus one email I forced my friend to send me, titled “test” with content “okay, okay, here is an email for you”.
Later in the same year, I learn HTML and made my first web page. I was so excited to have a simple HTML page with my scanned photo on it, my name with different colors each character, then a big font of “Welcome to My Homepage”. The next day, I went to university’s computer lab to create a Geocities account to upload my homepage. From all people that I know, I was the first to have a personal homepage on the net, even though it was just a single lame page.
For the next few months, I was experimenting with HTML and web scripts. I expanded my website to few pages, from “About Me” page to artist photo gallery. Interestingly, all my pages were full of colorful scripts, from the flying spotlights to mouse trails. Ha ha ha, trust me, it was totally out of design taste ! I simply want to put all the cool scripts that I collected to be displayed.
My first attempt to design a “proper” website was in 2000. After learning a little bit of Photoshop from my friends, I made my first design with green and orange combination. Yes, you read that right, green and orange. Then I decided to have something cooler for domain name. No more Geocities, I signed up for the cheapest package in a hosting company, and bought www.robertsetiadi.or.id domain. By that time, I got few friends already who had a Geocities homepage, yet I was still the first to use my own domain for my website.
When the era of HTML 4 began, again I was the first among my friends to adapt it. Playing with CSS, JavaScript, making a guestbook, doing simple php and asp page, I had fun doing all those as early adapter.
By the time people start talking about Web 2.0, I already created my guestbook using php and set up a phpbb forum as part of my website. I was wondering what is so big by being abke to put our own content on the net as I already did that myself before, by php code.
Then it was the era of blogging.
For quite some time, I refused to blog and decided to stay with my own website’s format. When I thought that it was cool to have visitor say something about a page, I created a php code, insert it into my pages, and it’s done ! Nice and easy. When bot started spamming on my pages, I added visual confirmation code (lately replaced with captcha) and got the problem solved.
It was in late 2008 when I finally added the “Blog” section in my website, and started to write my first blog, still using my own php code. It was not bad, but somehow feels different since I still need my Dreamweaver to write my blog.
In May 2010 I did a little study on free blog engines that can be installed as part of a website, just like a forum (I did forum integration before, first using phpbb then SMF). After some searching, WordPress became my choice, but I decided to postpone, waiting for their promised version 3.0.
June 2010, finally WordPress 3.0 was released. Downloaded it, uploaded it, then installed it.
Installing was quite easy. No problem at all. Problem started when I was trying to make my blog looked like the other sections of my website. Apparently it was not that easy to customize WordPress theme. So the research began.
After 2 days of study, I finally understand how themes work in WordPress 3.0
The default Twenty-Ten theme from WordPress 3.0 is cool and nice, but it’s definitely not the theme you want to work on for your first attempt to understand WP theme, trust me.
With Google’s help, I found this interesting WordPress Theme Generator and decided to try it. Being highly customizable in visual guide, this generator produces simple theme that makes it easier for minor tweak later, with only basic understanding of HTML and CSS.
Few hours of work, upload process, and done ! Now I have a working blog that looks like the other parts of my website. Spent few minutes to copy my “old” blog into the new engine, and here I am, writing my first “new” blog in WordPress.
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